What Chomsky wrote in self-defense

[Rakesh Bhandari]

I think this Nation letter shows how badly Chomsky has muddied the waters.
On the one hand, he defends his right to defend Faurisson without careful
analysis or indeed any knowledge of what he has actually written (an
admirable and justifiable position); on the other hand, he attempts to
reassure us that Faurisson supported the good fight against the Nazis while
correctly underlining that it is irrelevant to the civil liberties issue.
But having made the parenthetical comment, Chomsky now makes it impossible
to determine whether his defense of free speech is absolute or whether he
thinks in the case of RF free speech win outs  because of the little actual
danger RF represents as he is not a real fascist or war criminal (indeed
according to Chomsky he is a Jew sympathizer), or does not control the
media. I can understand why people would be outraged by Chomsky's lame
attempt to reassure us that RF is no real danger, and perhaps they then
confused their opposition to Chomsky's irrelevant comments with opposition
to his brave defense of civil liberties.  But in my reading Chomsky is as
much to blame for the confusion here.

I still don't understand how Faurisson was building his Holocaust denials
into his lectures on French literature. Professors are not allowed to teach
whatever they want; their courses have to be approved, right (I am not a
professor)? For example, a prof once told me that the relevant committee
would likely not grant him permission to teach only three volumes of one
damn book (Marx's Capital in a geography course) for a whole semester. Why
was RF given approval to deny the Shoah in a course on French literature?
How did he fit it into such a course?


>courageously against Nazism" in "the right cause"). I even wrote in 1969
>that it would be wrong to bar counterinsurgency research in the
>universities, though it was being used to murder and destroy, a position
>that I am not sure I could defend.

It surely would not be wrong to deny such research, however it was dressed
up,  any and all funding (there are better ways to spend it); it would
surely not be wrong not deny it a scientific imprimatur. For example, what
are we to make of Yale mathematician Serge Lange's argument that Samuel
Huntington's math was not of sufficient quality to allow him entry into the
National Academy of Sciences?
Seemed like a reasonable argument to me.

best, rakesh